Direction: Read the passage and answer the following questions.
Ahmedabad’s Sunday market that sells waste is this 35-year-old artist’s most liked hunting ground. That’s where he picks saw-blades, printer toners, monitors, busted VCDs and hard disks, video players and other castaway gems.
Back in home, he dismantles his treasure of scrap and segregates it into big pieces (the videoplayer’s outer case), mid-sized (the insides of a hard disk) and small pieces (innards of a mobile).
This is art you can get up, close and personal with. The works grab the viewer’s attention at several levels.
Aesthetically, the creations themselves - such as Frivolity which uses feathers and terracotta diyas painted in dark fossil green that give it a strange life - appeal in a live-and-kicking sort of way.
Look a little closer and hey, you spot a zipper. Then it’s a journey all your own. Your eyes identify hairpins, spray spouts that hairdressers use, paper clips, thread, computer ribbons and the insides of everything from watches to the sliding metal bits that support drawers.
You can almost hear the words whirring.
So Hashissh, constructed from paper clips, backpack clips, a shining CD and twirled thread, may invite you to study its water-blue, pinks and green or Nelumbeshwar may beckon, bathed in acrylic pink and grey-black. But once you’re standing in front of a piece, you spot the zips and the hairpins. Then you simply visually dismantle Har’s work and rebuild it all over again. Zoom in, zoom out. It’s great fun.
Visualising the colour of his work demands a lot of attention, says Har. “During creation, the material is all differently coloured. So there’s a red switch next to a white panel next to a black clip. It can be distracting. I don’t sketch, so I have to keep a sharp focus on the final look I am working towards.”
As his work evolved, Har discovered laser-cutting on a visit to a factory where he had gone to sand-blast one of his pieces. Hooked by the zingy shapes laser-cutting offered, Har promptly used it to speed up a scooter and lend an unbearable lightness of being to a flighty auto rickshaw, his latest works.
The NID-trained animation designer’s scrap quest was first inspired by a spider in his bathroom in Chennai when he was a teenager. He used a table-tennis ball (for the head), a bigger plastic ball (for the body) and twisted clothes hangers to form the legs. His next idea was to create a crab, and his mother obligingly brought one home from the market so that he could study and copy it.
Winning the first Art Positive fellowship offered by Bajaj Capital Arthouse last year gave Har the confidence to believe that he could make it as an artist or ‘aesthete’ as he likes to call himself.